How Users Interact with Facebook Fan Pages

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Matthew Barby

Many companies now have their own social media presence or are at least thinking about having one. The first port of call for most is a Facebook fan page where users can go on and ‘like’ the page and gain access to all sorts of different content from exclusive promotions and competitions to playing interactive games. These fan pages can be pivotal in directing traffic to the company’s website or reinforcing brand awareness, but just how exactly does the average Facebook user go about interacting with these brand pages?

A recent study was carried out by comSource that looked into the online activity of Facebook’s users and where they spent most of the time during their navigation through the website. What they found was that users spend over a quarter of their time on the website purely within their Newsfeed and they also found that users are 40-150 times more likely to consume branded content in the Newsfeed than to visit the Fan Page itself.

The study found that through utilising ‘friends of friends’ within Facebook, firms are able to gain a much wider reach and by providing regular content into the Newsfeed of their fans then they are much more likely to be shared with other friends. This enables the fan page to grow in size and popularity which, in turn, results in more web traffic. To conclude their findings, comScore summarised their data like this:

“By focusing on measuring the reach of their branded content among various constituencies, brands can more effectively understand and optimize the way in which they leverage their presence on Facebook. Secondly, we believe that brands can realize significant untapped benefits by understanding and focusing on reaching the Friends of their Fans. ”

How connected are we all to each other?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Matthew Barby

A recent study has been carried out by the boffins behind the scenes at Facebook to see what degree of separation we all have from each other. This test would show how interlinked we all are and not only that, but how easy information could spread from one person to another. The result was 3.74 degrees of separation (5 hops), or in Lehman’s terms, ‘a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend’ (confusing, eh?). In short, the degree of separation is about how many intermediaries are between the meeting of two people on average or how many ‘hops’ does it take to get to the next person.

In 2008, Facebook carried out a similar experiment and found the result was slightly higher at 4.28 degrees of separation (6 hops), however the size of the Facebook network was comparably much smaller so it could be expected that with Facebook’s growth that there would be differences with the results now. Facebook took an enormous sample of their social network to carry out the experiment and the results could be invaluable to social marketeers.

“In our studies, performed earlier this year, we examined all 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10% of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them. To date, these are the largest social network studies ever released.”

Other social networks such as LinkedIn have tried to illuminate these degrees of separation to make you more aware of people within your extended network and you will see this on your profile where it will tell you if someone is a first degree, second degree or third degree connection to you. Maybe Facebook and other social media sites may look to follow suit in this way.

If there is one thing that we can take from this study it is that it shows how interlinked we all are and how the likes of viral marketing and social media campaigns can really take off online and pay dividends. From a search engine optimisation (SEO) point of view, social media can offer great ways of getting out your fresh content to millions of people across the world which will improve the traffic to your site and its ranking within the search engine results page (SERP).

Remember to check back on our blog and be sure to tell your friend’s friend, who can then let a friend of their friend know… or something like that anyway!

Creating a Facebook Page for your business

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Matthew Barby

With more than 800 million active users and at least 50% of those users logging in daily, Facebook has become an invaluable marketing tool for businesses to exploit. The average Facebook user is connect to around 80 different community pages, groups, and events so there is an instant route to starting your social community and improving your SEO.

You don’t need to be highly technical web designers to create a page due to the easy-to-use interface that Facebook provides which is aimed at the average user. The first step is to go to the Facebook homepage and underneath the sign-up form is the ‘create a page’ link which you can click through. Now you will be presented with a page (shown below) that will ask you what type of page you want to create.

Once you have selected which page is most relevant to you, you will need to fill in the registration form and then you can get on with creating your profile. The first step towards doing this is to upload a nice profile picture. We recommend a slim and tall profile image as it can be quite eye-catching and you will see many of the Facebook pages take this approach. Now that you have your profile image up you will be presented with the ‘Get Started’ screen, where you can then invite in your existing friends, email contacts, etc.

Once you have invited in your contacts, click the ‘publish this page’ link at the top of the page and you can send out a message on Facebook to let people know you are on the site. Go to the ‘Wall’ tab on the left and you are ready to start posting some content to your followers. The best practise is to keep content flowing and linking in material from your other social media accounts so that you can have a good community of people looking at your content.

Now your page is set up, you can start adding photos, videos and running promotions which will be able to drive web traffic through to your website and more importantly result in extra revenue. Facebook offers a free ‘Insights’ tool that can track the click-throughs, follower activity and many more statistics from your Facebook page in a similar way that Google analytics does which can be very useful. Also, once your page is up and running you can assign other administrators that can update and manage the page by going into the settings and clicking on the ‘admins’ tab.

This is the basics stages toward setting up your page but there are many other features that can be implemented to give it a more unique look via Facebook apps and we will go into this further in future blog entries so be sure to check back for more info!

American Car Company Relies Solely on SEO for Business

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Matthew Barby

A US organisation is claiming that it relies solely on SEO services to bring in business, removing the need for print marketing in the process. And they claim they have never performed better.

Executive Limousine’s chief executive, Douglas Schwartz, was recently featured in the New York Times when he made the decision to pledge all of his company’s advertising budget onto pay per click and SEO services.

The paper reports that “As a result, 85 percent of Executive Limousine’s business comes from the internet.”

He also uses social media sites, like facebook and Twitter, to place localised PPC adverts. He claims to have spent thousands on his SEO crusade thus far, however it seems to be paying off for him.